The police arrested a man suspected of robbing a convenience store on First Avenue, but his accomplice — who is wanted for at least 16 other heists — is still at large.

The police said that 30-year-old Duwayne Bascom and another man entered the store at 111 First Avenue on Nov. 21 at around 8:40 p.m., demanded an unknown amount of money and then fled with the cash. But Mr. Bascom has not yet been tied to any of the other robberies, three of which occurred around the East Village.

In the first, the suspect entered a Subway on Second Avenue between St. Marks Place and Ninth Street on Nov. 9 at around 2:25 a.m., brandished a knife and demanded money from the cashier. Police did not say how much money he received.
Read more…

Daniel Maurer Medics treat the motorcycle accident victim.

Two incidents marred New Year’s celebrations in the East Village during today’s early morning hours. At Second Avenue and 13th Street, around 3 a.m., dozens of police officers moved to detain Occupy Wall Street protesters as helicopters circled over the neighborhood; about an hour later at 12th Street between Avenues A and B, a man was struck by a motorcycle and taken to the hospital in critical condition.

The motorcycle accident occurred around 4:20 a.m. When The Local arrived on the scene, a man lay facedown, bleeding onto the street, having been struck by a BMW with Maine plates as he crossed the street well away from the intersection at Avenue A. Paramedics transported him to Beth Israel Hospital, where the police said he arrived with severe head trauma and is currently in critical condition. The driver of the motorcycle, a 38-year-old male, is not suspected of criminality.

The earlier incident at Second Avenue and 13th Street occurred after protesters clashed with police at Zuccotti Park shortly before midnight. The Post reported that one officer was stabbed in the hand with a pair of scissors then, and City Room reported that just before 1:30 a.m., police officers entered the park to clear it of about 150 people, five of whom were led off in handcuffs. After a group marched north, 60 to 100 people, eyewitnesses told The Local, arrived at Second Avenue and East 13^th Street around 3 a.m. There, their progress was stopped by a wall of police officers. Read more…

G.V.S.H.P.

After defying his landlord’s repeated requests to stop holding events at A Gathering of the Tribes, Steve Cannon,who founded the homegrown gallery in 1991, has received a notice ordering him to vacate his East Third Street live-work space by Feb. 1. The gallerist, who said that he had neglected to sign a new rent agreement in part because he is blind, has vowed to prevent yet another disappearance of an eccentric art space.

“I’m going to fight her,” Mr. Cannon said of his landlord. “I don’t think she has a leg to stand on.” Read more…

Stephen Rex Brown

After abruptly shuttering during the summer and moving its parties to the basement of Lucky Cheng’s, Nublu will reopen at its original Avenue C location, serving beer and wine rather than hard liquor.

E-mailing from Sweden, Nublu’s owner, Ilhan Ersahin, said that the club would reopen tonight at 62 Avenue C and will once again operate from 8 p.m. till 4 a.m. nightly, but will now host earlier shows at lower volumes. He described the new operation as “less clubby style,” with “more wine/lounge/art/talky kinda vibes,” and said that finger food would be served. He added that there would be “more acoustic-friendly nights, neighborhood-style, with an international touch” in keeping with his record label. Read more…

Stephen Rex Brown

A letter sent from Kenneth Fisher to local politicians indicates that the attorney’s client, Benjamin Shaoul’s Magnum Real Estate Group, may be close to reselling the property that houses the Cabrini Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation, which Magnum recently purchased for $25.5 million. With a new for-profit operator in the mix, the deal would allay fears that the building will be replaced by condos, and would help insure that it continue to be used as a nursing home.

The letter was sent on Wednesday to State Senator Daniel Squadron and other politicians who had earlier written to Mr. Fisher reiterating their position that “any future use of the building should retain nursing home beds on the Lower East Side.” In his response, Mr. Fisher indicated that on Dec. 6, he was advised by a lawyer representing Cabrini that an earlier plan to relocate the not-for-profit nursing home had fallen through, and the Center was now negotiating to be purchased by a for-profit operator that might also be able to purchase the building from Magnum. Read more…

Have you abandoned South Brooklyn Pizza ever since it stopped carrying Manhattan Special coffee soda on draft? (We’re assured it’ll return when the takeout parlor expands into a proper restaurant, possibly next month.) Well, there’s a new option just a block away: L’asso has opened its East Village outpost for dinner. Last month, The Local told you what to expect from the NoLIta transplant. Check back here shortly for interior shots as well as the menu, which features a Polish pie with kielbasa, pickles, and mustard oil.

Daniel Maurer

Evan McKnight, who discovered on Christmas Day that his $1,100 bicycle had been stolen from his East 10th Street apartment building, has recovered the bike and will end the year on a positive note – though he’s out $50 that he spent printing “Stolen Bike” flyers plus $40 that had to be paid to the man who returned the custom wheels after seeing one of the flyers posted at a local shop.

Mr. McKnight said that yesterday evening, a man came into Continuum Cycles on Avenue B to buy a tire tube for a bike he had purchased on the street the previous night. He told the rest of the story in an e-mail to The Local.

On his way out of the shop he noticed one of my flyers. He gets home to his new bike and after deducing that he’s in fact purchased a stolen bike from the ‘homeless man’ he decides to bring it back to Continuum Cycles. He speaks with my friend Jeff and tells him he doesn’t want the reward money he just wants his $40 back. Jeff hands it over out of pocket, and sends me a text later that night to let me know he had my bike.

Jeff Underwood, the owner of Continuum Cycles, said that at least once a day, someone comes into his shop complaining about a stolen bike, and complaints about stolen parts are even more numerous. (The editor of this blog had his locked bike stolen on the Bowery last month, a couple of months after having to replace a stolen seat.) Read more…

Anthony Ptak

After 28 years in the East Village, the owners of Polonia have closed shop after their landlord said she would more than triple their rent.

“I came here from Poland, my husband and I raised our children, and ran this business. We worked hard. I did everything I could,” Renata Jurczyk, who owns Polonia with her husband Jozef, said in Polish. “The landlords are killing small businesses in this neighborhood with the rent.”

The family had a small, informal gathering at Polonia last night with longtime customers. “After all these years, Polonia was important to the East Village,” said Ms. Jurczyk, 51. “When I told customers who have been coming here a long time that we’re closing, they started crying. They were Poles and non-Poles, and it was their second home.”

Ms. Jurczyk and her son Paul, 23, said they closed on Christmas Eve after the landlord, Ludmilla Lozowy, said she would raise their rent from $3,500 to $12,000 per month starting February 2012. “I tried to do something, but the landlord said we pay too little,” said Ms. Jurczyk. Read more…

Joel Raskin

Good morning, East Village.

The owner of 77 East Seventh Street, Robert Koziej, is among those honored on public advocate Bill de Blasio’s 2011 list of “NYC’s Worst Landlords,” with 110 infractions listed.

So do you think teachers should be allowed to wear flip-flops and tank tops to school? An editorial in the Daily News sides with East Village principal Marlon Hosang of Public School 64, who wants a “professional” dress code. The paper sarcastically says of the teacher who filed a complaint: “Good policy: Defend the right to look like a slob. Challenge the ability of a school leader to set a respectful tone in his building.”

Jazz musician Sam Rivers died on Monday, reports The New York Times. Studio Rivbea, the noncommercial performance space he ran out of his Bond Street loft, was an anchor of the 1970s loft scene, and “served as an avant-garde hub through the end of the decade.” Read more…

Yesterday, City Room reported that “the picture of crime in New York City in 2011 is shaping up as virtually a mirror image of the year before, according to police statistics.” In the East Village, statistics released this week (tracking incidents reported to the Ninth Precinct in the period ending Dec. 11) show that crime complaints were almost universally down with three weeks left in the year. Petit larceny (theft of property valued at $1,000 or less), grand larceny auto, and misdemeanor sex crimes were the only categories that saw increases in reported crime following Deputy Inspector Kenneth Lehr’s appointment as precinct commander in January. Below, our chart comparing this year’s numbers with last year’s, and comparing the percentage of change in the Ninth Precinct to the same citywide.

As Mars Bar disappears, an artist who lived across the street from the dive and was regularly featured on its walls is honoring its memory by selling t-shirts. Last year, Sergey Aniskov marked Christmas at Mars Bar by painting a mural of a booze-swilling anarchist Santa Claus (see it below). This year, he has printed the image on limited-edition t-shirts that are going for $22.99 on eBay and will also be sold, said the artist, at Reason Clothing at 436 East Ninth Street.

“I was a regular at Mars Bar for ten years,” said Mr. Aniskov, 41, who came to New York from Moscow in the 1990s and now works at Animation Collective. “It was the place where you went when you were really having problems. You knew you’d find good company and get good feedback from the real people and the real East Village. I felt like I had to do this as a memory.” Read more…

Noah Fecks B.A.D. Burger

Keith Masco, the owner of B.A.D. Burger and once an outspoken critic of Community Board 3, will try to get approval for a beer and wine license at his restaurant at next month’s meetings. Mr. Masco’s reappearance before the board comes over a year after he tried to obtain a liquor license for a seafood restaurant and fishmonger at the same location. The board’s denial of his efforts resulted in Mr. Masco colorfully writing to EV Grieve, “I see no reason to bow to the communists at the community board.”

Other burger joints are on the just-released agenda, as well. BareBurger, which has been under construction for several months on Second Avenue will also push for a beer-wine license. Lastly, Five Napkin Burger on 14th Street will seek approval for a sidewalk cafe. The yet-to-open chain joint was previously a bodega.

And there’s one more location with a rocky history with the community board. Goat Town will ask the board for approval of an upgrade to its space on Fifth Street. The previous restaurant there, Butcher Bay, sued the board for denying an upgrade to its liquor license.

Lastly, new owners are apparently getting involved in the nightclub La Vie under undesirable circumstances: there was a knife-fight there on Thanksgiving.

Leave your mink scarf at home when you head out to Revision Lounge on Avenue B: the owner doesn’t allow any animal fur inside his bar. DNAInfo reports that doormen check the authenticity of patrons’ pelts and have infuriated a few of them in the process. Johnny Barounis, a vegetarian who also owns bars in the Lower East Side and Upper East Side with the same policy, said that “the fur thing is basically what I can do to help change some behavior.”

In September, Bikram Choudhury, the founder of Bikram Yoga, filed a $1 million lawsuit against his former student Greg Gumucio, founder of the wildly popular Yoga to the People chain. Mr. Choudhury copyrighted his series of 26 poses and two breathing exercises in 2002, and he’s been known to sue people who infringe on it. The Bikram guru has said the poses were designed in a series for health benefits, and to effectively teach the courses, instructors must become certified, which costs $10,000. The million-dollar question: Can yoga be owned?

G.V.S.H.P. The Gathering of the Tribes building.

The landlord of Gathering of the Tribes says she will now make good on her longstanding threat to send the freewheeling artistic space into exile.

The relationship between Steve Cannon, the blind poet who founded Tribes, and his landlord, Lorraine Zhang, seems to have been contentious virtually from the moment he sold the building at 285 East Third Street to her in 2005 for $1.2 million.

The space regularly hosts gallery openings and music shows; a magazine is put together there, as well. But all the foot traffic, artistic exploration and revelry comes at a price Ms. Zhang says she can’t afford.

“My attorney is going to send him a notice that he must remove all the events from the building or remove himself,” she said. Read more…

PKSB Architects The original and final proposals for a rooftop addition to the Puck Building.

The Landmarks Preservation Commission finally approved a rooftop addition to the Puck Building today, concluding a four-month process that resulted in numerous rejections of numerous designs.

The owner of the landmarked building at Lafayette and East Houston Streets, Jared Kushner, expressed his pleasure with the outcome, which only came after four other designs were rejected by the commission.

Michael Natale Puck.

“I am very pleased with the results. We got an extension approved that allows us to go forward with a special project,” said Mr. Kushner, who owns the New York Observer. “The additions to the building will further enhance one of the most iconic buildings in the world.”

Elisabeth de Bourbon, a spokeswoman for the commission, said that the latest design would not amount to a drastic change to the Puck Building.

Commissioner Michael Devonshire, an architectural conservator, said, “They’ve reached the target of minimalism in terms of massing.”
Read more…

Daniel Maurer

A judge fined the owners of IHOP $2,000 for soil on the roof of the restaurant and garbage bags and boxes obstructing an exit, court documents filed earlier this month show.

The ruling from the Environmental Control Board — a court that adjudicates violations to the building code — notes that the issues have been resolved. The soil on the roof, which may have come from a neglected rooftop garden, even resulted in a stop work order that has been lifted.

Meanwhile, Borough President Scott Stringer and Councilwoman Rosie Mendez sent a letter to the owner of the IHOP on 14th Street last month asking him to remedy issues regarding odors and noise from the restaurant’s rooftop equipment before going before a judge as “a good faith gesture to the community.” Read more…

If you want a piece of Mars Bar, now’s the time to ask. As you can see in video shot this morning, the wall separating the old dive from its neighbor has come down, and construction workers are clearing away wooden beams.

Meanwhile, a few blocks away, the 7-Eleven that had been slated to open on the Bowery last week was accepting deliveries this morning. A worker on the scene said it would finally open this Friday (an early Christmas gift to the East Village?). We’ve asked corporate headquarters for the official word.

Have your own photos of the Mars Bar’s demise? Add them to The Local’s Flickr pool.

Lit has announced that its holiday party, tomorrow at 9 p.m., will double as a benefit for Jonathan Toubin, the promoter, D.J., and “beloved fixture on the New York nightlife scene” (per East Village Radio) who was recently hospitalized in Portland, Ore. after being pinned by a taxi cab that crashed into his hotel room. We’ll add this to our holiday events calendar; in the meantime, see the flyer here.